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Recent Reviews
David G. Myers
Rave The Wall Street Journal Charming and clear-eyed ... Mr. Myers has a deft touch, dropping mentions of studies here and there to get the main point across, and mixing them with everyday observations and quotes from philosophers ... Mr. Myers also offers plenty of useful advice.
Michael Slepian
Positive Wall Street Journal If nothing else, this book salves the sense that I have of a full closet bursting with unmentionable deeds and flaws—that if anyone saw the true me, they would flee...If that’s the case, it’s the case for everyone...Over years of research, Mr. Slepian has cataloged the secrets kept by 50,000 respondents...Most secrets involve one of 38 experiences...The most commonly kept involve lies, romantic desire, finances and sexual behavior: 97% of people say they’ve kept something in one of these 38 areas secret from someone...On average, the people studied kept secrets in 13 areas, and in five they kept complete secrets—not telling a soul...It seems almost all of us have something to hide...A book about secrets is necessarily more than a book about secrets...It’s also about social judgment, and about mind-wandering, to explain why secrecy nags at us...And about theory of mind, the ability to think about what others are thinking...Unfortunately, this book has little to say specifically about these trends vis-à-vis the internet...The book is not all studies...It contains several vivid anecdotes...Melody Casson smothered her baby and confessed 52 years later...Mr. Slepian learned as an adult that he and his brother came from sperm donors...Those secrets were eventually revealed...What’s most striking is that they remained secrets for so long...Broadly speaking, you may want criminal or immoral activity exposed, but I find its occasional seclusion an acceptable price for the fact that, even in a world awash in freely flowing data, secrecy survives.
Leonard Mlodinow
Positive The Wall Street Journal Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist and author, offers a crash course, one that feels less like cramming than like a colorful tour of the behavior of humans—and the rest of the animal kingdom. Most of this smart, trim volume is about the science of emotion rather than how to use it, but he doesn’t miss the opportunity to dole out advice and provide opportunities for self-reflection ... The advice sprinkled throughout this book is not original, but it doesn’t need to be. Humans have a hard enough time absorbing the tried-and-true ... The book skirts some deep theoretical questions, perhaps to most readers’ benefit ... Mr. Mlodinow populates his book with the most grimly eye-catching examples he can find ... Yet somehow I recall the book as jaunty. Some tales are not only astounding but touching.
Shankar Vedantam
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... lively and digestible ... The last words of the last chapter constitute a question: \'When should we fight self-deception, and when—and how much—should we embrace it?\' Seems like something worth addressing earlier ... In the end, the book’s merits lie not in the depth of its analysis but in its breadth of synthesis and quotable lucidity.
Ethan Kross
Positive The Wall Street Journal Despite the title’s reference to self-talk, the book uses “chatter” to refer to nearly any kind of negative thoughts or emotions. This comes to resemble a branding exercise—perhaps a necessary one to sell a book these days—but the advice is good, and some of it nonobvious ... Mr. Kross tidily summarizes the best of his advice in a short chapter called \'The Tools.\' (I’m glad to see he’s now researching curricula on their use in middle schools.) This chapter stands well on its own, rendering the rest of the brief book relatively optional. A full reading offers narratives—on a baseball player who choked, a scholarship student who struggled, and Mr. Kross’s own panicked response to a mailed threat—as well as some mild dad jokes, but the easy prose is unremarkable. It’s also littered with references to brain studies that add a whiff of fiber but aren’t really news-you-can-use ... But Mr. Kross is likable and has done important work. If he finds things not to like in my previous paragraph, he knows better than most what to do.
Rachel Lance
Positive The Wall Street Journal The author vividly describes the physics and physiology of explosions, shock waves and asphyxiation, often addressing morbid topics with bemused detachment ... The author paints for us a portrait of herself as a sleep-deprived, motorcycle-riding, cake-baking, scuba-diving pursuer of truth at any cost. We follow her in novelistic detail ... We also learn a bit of technical jargon...
Jonathan Waldman
Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Waldman follows all the drama like a fly on a brick wall, richly reporting scenes and conversations, many on job sites where both circuitry and civility break down. The book is reminiscent of a reality-TV show about a scrappy startup, complete with backstory segments as we learn the pasts and personalities of each new hire. There are also a lot of digressions—the history of the bricklayers union, how much pinboys at bowling alleys were tipped, how literal sausages are made, Mr. Peters’s 16th-century ancestors, his high-school swim coach’s career as a famous-in-Japan professional wrestler. None of it is boring, exactly, but the book is not in a hurry to get anywhere ... Despite its themes of technological advancement, the book is above all a human-interest tale. Sure, automation could reduce injury and speed construction, but there’s much to celebrate in quirk and inefficiency. That goes even for bricks.
Stuart Russell
Rave The Wall Street Journal Mr. Russell makes a delicious excursion into the philosophy of utilitarianism and the psychology of preferences. How do we balance the wants and well-being of different people, or the same person across time and mindsets? Is there even a singular self with coherent desires? Mr. Russell’s exciting book goes deep, while sparkling with dry witticisms.
Bina Venkataraman
Positive The Washington Post ... wise but not wonkish ... By bringing tales from basketball, an Ebola epidemic, poker, classroom discipline and nuclear power plants, as well as literary depictions of her travels to Mexico, Japan, India and South Carolina, Venkataraman vividly depicts what happens when we don’t plan ahead and what we can do about it, on our own and together. Despite the high-seeming bar suggested by the book’s title, there’s no need to be an optimist or to have a special future-telling telescope. Whether you’re trying to lose a few pounds or avert climate catastrophe, all that’s needed is to be a realist with an imagination.
Russell A. Poldrack
Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Poldrack comes across in this accessible book as eminently levelheaded but also personable. He makes a clear argument for the scientific method ... If one wanted, one could even use this book to argue for teaching statistics instead of geometry or calculus in school. Statistical methods and mindsets are helpful every day. Causality is messy and cognition is faulty. The New Mind Readers will teach you some things about the brain. More important, it may also teach you how to use one.
Adrienne Mayor
Positive The Washington Post \"In Gods and Robots, Stanford science historian Adrienne Mayor describes how, more than 2,500 years before the modern computer, people told tales of autonomous machines that could labor, entertain, kill and seduce ... In Gods and Robots, Mayor carefully examines secondary and source material — writings and artwork — to discern the ancients’ views on minds both supernatural and soulless. She takes an academic tone... but draws occasional parallels to modern sci-fi movies such as \'Blade Runner\' and Ex Machina.\'\
Daniel H. Pink
Positive The Washington Post In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel H. Pink doesn’t reveal every secret about perfect timing — how long should one wait before following up on an unanswered email? — but he does give a cheat sheet on when to work, sleep and play, useful for both freelancers and those beholden to bosses ... Pink doesn’t go especially deep into any area. He skips around between disparate topics, he notes the use of research assistants, and he has a tic of quoting study findings rather than putting these mostly pedestrian passages in his own words, a habit that gives the vague impression of lacking mastery of the material (or, more generously, of carefulness) ... The book is well-structured and goes down easy, with concise summaries often packaged with alliteration (type, task, time) ...the big-picture musings are a nice prompt for the interested reader at the finale of an otherwise practical book.
Frederick Crews
Positive The Washington Post Crews doesn’t spend much time on legacy, except to suggest that Freud’s distraction from real scientific and therapeutic work set psychology and neuroscience back by decades ... The book can be rough going in some places, through no fault of the dedicated author. Rather the source material eschews penetrability and plausibility; Freud’s accounts became so tangled over the years as he avoided admitting error that I fear there’s no untangling them. Even so, Freud is a surprisingly fun read, as Crews gets in plenty of sharp jabs. He seems to find the most damning way to spin any admission or incident, leaving one to wonder about his own interpretive filters. Still, given the facts presented, it’s hard to imagine additional disclosures that would completely reverse the overall impression.
Yuval Noah Harari
Positive The Washington Post Harari presents three possible futures. In one, humans are expendable. In a second, the elite upgrade themselves, becoming essentially another species that sees everyone else as expendable. In a third, we join the hive mind, worshiping data over individuals (or God). 'Connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning,' he writes. In any case, he says convincingly, 'the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley.' I enjoyed reading about these topics not from another futurist but from a historian, contextualizing our current ways of thinking amid humanity’s long march — especially a historian with Harari’s ability to capsulize big ideas memorably and mingle them with a light, dry humor.
Michael Lewis
Positive The Washington Post ...a well-researched and lively biography ... Despite the penetrating impact of the pair’s findings, the ideas seem obvious enough in retrospect that most people should grasp them easily ... The Undoing Project is an odd book. In describing Kahneman and Tversky’s findings and lives with equal attention, it appears to cater to readers not interested enough in their work to read Kahneman’s book, and yet so interested that they want to read about the scientists’ childhoods and the details of their careers ... Nevertheless, Lewis does as fine a job as anyone could with the formula. He makes the science easy and relatable. And with in-depth interviews and access to personal files, he also creates a convincing portrait of Kahneman and Tversky as an odd couple.